


How He Broke Me

by BunnyMoss



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 4
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Closeted Character, M/M, Manipulative Relationship, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pre-Canon, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 02:53:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20771336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BunnyMoss/pseuds/BunnyMoss
Summary: I had thought perhaps he wouldn’t be so bold as to try again just one day after our first incident. I had thought maybe he'd be more couth in his pursuit of me, as it was. But as I'd settled all alone in my tent and tried to stave off those prickling, wanton thoughts, he'd come and brushed his hand on the front flap again.And I'd let him in. Willingly.





	How He Broke Me

The first time in my life that I ever came to doubt myself was the night he first slept in my tent. It was the first of many such occurrences, and not the last time I would lose faith in who I was.

It was the beginning of the end of my life as I had known it to be.

The night was cold, and I don't remember what month it was, except that the heavy snow had not started to fall in the North yet. Our ranks were exhausted, and certainly I was among them in that. Even Pagan Min's men had faltered as the bitter cold set in late into that day. Tough as they'd been, they were not the fine Kyrati stock that my brothers in arms were. They were foreigners in our land: a welcome hand in helping our cause, when we thought them to be allies, but strangers to our mountains and our climate, and our culture.

I had taken a tent to myself at the back of our camp, further away from Min and his men. Much as it would have benefited me to share my commodities out under the stars or in a larger tent with my fellow soldiers, I hadn’t the heart for commiseration that night. Nor did I often feel I wanted to sleep so close to the other men. If Ishwari were not in my arms or pressed up back to back with me, I didn’t feel as though I could sleep soundly. Our treks from home were long and difficult, and I often feared I would not return home to her or our little child growing inside her. That night was no different as I laid awake listening to the rattle of gunfire in the distance, off in the valley somewhere. Would they encroach on our camp? Would they threaten us? Who was winning down there? The battle wasn’t my concern tonight. Only the restless night ahead of me.

And then there had been the crunch of footsteps in the dirt, and a swipe at the door flap of my tent that I supposed was intended to be a knock on the fabric.

“Mohan, are you awake?” I had heard him ask, and then without waiting for an answer he had unzipped the front flap and poked his head in boldly.

“Ah, you are. Awesome.”

I hadn’t the gall to respond to him, so shocked as I was to find Pagan Min fumbling onto his knees in the cramped space. It was a tent made only to accommodate one man, not two, and he was much larger than me as it was. And here he was, so brazenly lifting up my covers as though he intended to join me. For a brief, _painfully_ clear moment, I had considered simply moving aside to let him do just that.

Then my rationale had kicked in, and I saw Kyra's scrutiny over me. Her disappointed bitterness chilling me to the bone as I would have laid with another man so close beside me.

“What do you want?” I asked him as I tugged the covers right back out of his hands and threw it back over the ground in protest.

It was then that I had seen him shivering. I had not noticed before, when I kept my eyes spitefully shut to ignore his intrusion. I had thought I could pretend to be asleep, and that that would have deterred him.

“The other tents are full up, my friend, and no room around any of the fires. I thought I might come and join my fellow soldier here, and keep us both warm,” Pagan said, so matter-of-factly that I couldn’t bring myself to argue.

It was terribly cold, that much I couldn't deny. But what would the Gods think of this, I had thought. I could look the other way from the men who chose to share warmth in the night, but who was I to shirk the Gods' will so quickly myself? I had spent so long convincing myself that in the eyes of my fellow brothers I should be the pious man I purported myself to be, that the thought of tarnishing the Ghale name over one evening of innocent camaraderie scared me half to death. Yet something about that disarming smile and the calm demeanor of my new tent-mate had me scooting over to make room for him as my cold extremities ached.

I said nothing as he sat beside me as I laid still, making a point to face away from him to preserve my decency. He peeled his shirt and trousers off, and mumbled something about wet clothes making him colder. Like a shock to my system, a lightning bolt of clarity, I found in my mind's eye a picture of him sitting there, mostly naked and pale as the moonlight, even as he was right behind me and I could have rolled over to see for myself. Just as quickly as I'd imagined it, the thought fled my mind on the breeze and just as swiftly pooled in my gut in an all too familiar way.

Had he any freckles below his collar? Was he strong and muscular? Was he well fed like I thought someone from Hong Kong might be? How would his chest look with my head against it—

“Oh Kyra,” I had cussed then, and scrubbed my face in shame of those impure thoughts.

More than once they had plagued me, but only so strongly when I had looked at Pagan Min. I could think of my wife that way and feel no discomfort in the eyes of the Gods. In all her radiant youth and beauty she danced through my thoughts as often as the weather and my daily prayers. Recently, just as often, I had seen this foreign man prancing about just out of reach.

“Your god, yes?” Pagan asked behind me, and I felt him lay down beside me as the covers shifted.

He did not touch me, or turn to me. He laid flat on his back with his hands folded on his stomach. It was I who turned then to see him that way, if only because my arm was becoming sore from laying on my other side for so long.

“Goddess,” I corrected him, and he simply nodded.

In my head I had prayed for strength then. Looking at him caused me great pain, and tickled at that uncomfortable coil of something too close to arousal in the pit of my stomach.

Just from having him near me like this? In his underwear but concealed by the blanket? _My_ blanket?

“Congratulations on your wife's pregnancy, by the way. I don’t think I ever said it,” he had perked up so brightly, but there was a twinkle in his eye that left me choking on my breath, “you've been a busy, busy man back home, hmm?”

“What do you mean busy?” I asked him, and in his mercurial way, he laughed at me.

“I mean that you must have been trying for a while to conceive. Else it's just a surprise and you’ve been bedding her a while now.”

The smirk that curled across those lips of his infuriated me. He had always been a blunt man – more so than me, which was saying something – but this had been a whole new level of intrusiveness. With my men, I wouldn’t shy away from bragging about how good she had been to me often, spreading herself in our bed when I came home to her. With Pagan it felt wrong. I had thought then that I didn’t want him to know of the Tarun Matara in that way. As though by somehow preserving her image, I made her look better to him even as he shunned our religious practices.

What I know now is that I had simply been afraid he would stop pursuing me in his strange and persistent way, if he knew I was so committed to her and her alone. Even now this thought shakes me deeply. My wife does not deserve to be injured by this selfish part of me, one that would willingly shove her aside for the attention of another.

When I hadn’t answered him fast enough, Pagan proceeded to carry the conversation himself as he often did.

“I find it strange that you don’t ever want to share a tent with any of us. It's harmless, Mohan. Are you afraid of yourself?” he had asked so casually with cheer in every word, as though he wasn’t jamming his fingers under my shell and trying to pry it away with his voice alone.

“What do I have to be afraid of?” I challenged him, meeting his eye then for longer than I probably should have.

“The Gods can’t see what you also keep yourself blind to, my friend,” he said, closing his eyes and stretching as best as he could in the tight little tent.

His bare thigh brushed the side of mine for a moment, and our feet touched at the bottom of the covers, and I let him do it willingly. Cryptic as he had been, it struck some sort of nerve in me. But just as quickly as he had come slipping into my tent and chipping away at my shell, I found him fast asleep on his back.

I would like to say that I let him lie there as I kept vigil through the night. That I simply listened to the chattering of badgers in the forest, or the little nocturnal creatures in the trees above us. That I had held true to my faith and withstood my first test of strength.

My curiosity got the better of me.

As he sprawled across the floor, draped in my covers with his arms above his head and his legs spread open, I looked. And looked. And admired. And _wanted_. It had to have been delirium, I thought. Sickness and exhaustion and lack of sleep. And perhaps I had missed my dear Ishwari too much. Perhaps it had translated into some sort of sick thirst I had no understanding of.

But, no. No, it had been entirely, purely _Pagan_ in my thoughts. This much I now understand, where I couldn't back then.

It was then that I found myself reaching out to touch him. A fingertip over the hollow of his sternum, tracing the divide of his broad chest. A palm pressed hesitantly to his strong shoulder, squeezing the plush muscle under his skin. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might wake him from his apparently deep sleep.

What I could see above the covers, I allowed myself to indulge in gluttonously. I soaked in every freckled inch of him from the ribcage up without ever stopping to think the Gods would judge me for my greed. He was a handsome man, and so strapping for his age. At twenty years old, I had been much scrappier and scrawnier than him. Then again, we came from two different worlds. A Kyrati in poverty and strife couldn’t ever dream of being this portrait of health and radiance that a wealthy foreigner came to be.

I had just been about to force myself away from him when his last waking words rang like a prayer bell through my thoughts.

_The Gods can't see what you also keep yourself blind to._

Greed and hunger overtook me like a wildfire. Sucked me down and drowned me under its current. Somehow I twisted those words to fit my strange and unfamiliar desires. I shaped them into an excuse. A justification for the sin I was about to commit.

I laid beside him, close as I could be without actually pressing all of me up against him – for I feared yet again that I would wake him – and I closed my eyes tight as I could. For good measure, I carefully nudged my forehead into the side of his chest, finding that it helped me keep myself blind to the world. His heartbeat thrummed so quickly in his chest, and I wondered if he was having a nightmare. With that thought sitting strangely at the forefront of my mind, I shoved my hand beneath the covers and right between his legs. He was asleep, so why should I have bothered with preamble, I figured? It wasn’t a pursuit of pleasure on my part, and certainly not his in his deep slumber, so why bother?

Pagan was heavy in my hand, and I remember just how similar to my own cock that he felt when I gripped him. For some reason – perhaps my own unhinged perversion in that moment – I had expected him to be erect in my palm. It was a soft and flaccid weight, and more substantial than my own, and as I cradled him I felt again that spark of heat in my belly. It was a shameful pleasure I indulged in, letting the warmth coil in my groin as it pleased.

Much to my shock, as I found myself choking on my own breath like a giddy teenager, my first gentle squeeze was met with a reactive twitch. A nudge against my hand, asking for more. And so I gave him just as he asked even as he huffed out a snore above me in his sleep. One shift of my hand had me plunging it into the waistband of his underwear and seeking out that twitching perk once again. I lingered for a sinful moment on the tufts of trimmed hair at the base of him, finding my fingers fumbling through the softness of it before I found _him_ again.

Already he was at half mast, and even half-erect he was impressively thick. His cock had bobbed to meet my seeking palm and it swelled with a throb as I wrapped my fingers around him. My own trousers were uncomfortably tented by now, and it took all of my reserve of willpower not to rut right into his hip for my own gain where he pressed against me. Too much of this, and he was liable to wake and find me this way. Even still, I couldn’t hold in a groan when I stroked him just once. Oh, how he stiffened then, rising to his full glory in my hand as he snorted in his deep sleep.

The giddiness I felt was akin to nothing I’d ever experienced. All thoughts of things good and holy and righteous had fled from my mind with haste, leaving me only with impure, wanton cravings. There I was, worshipping Pagan Min with my eyes shut tight and a fistful of his erection. We had both been so cold when he entered my tent. Now I was flushed with heat and hunger and thirst. Yalung had laid his hellish claws over us there in the dark of my tent in the woods.

I wish I could say that my sense had come to me then. I wish I could say that Banashur had shaken some clarity into my addled mind and reminded me of my Ishwari back home. Of my child – I was confident I would be given a son first and foremost to follow in my footsteps and carry on our name. I wish I could say those things.

It was Pagan himself who startled me out of my gaze as with a snap of his hips he came alive just as my fingers slid over the swollen head of him. He had left a smear of his sticky pre-come on my fingers as I yanked my hand away in fear, and as he hissed through his teeth I quickly rolled myself back over and forced myself as far from him as I could get in my tiny little tent. He had been awake the entire time, I came to realize, and he had simply let me do as I pleased, the demon that he was. Icy cold washed over me in sickening waves as reality crashed back into me like a swift tide of Kyra's harsh judgment.

I had kept my eyes shut, and I had kept what I did – what _we_ did – hidden under my covers. I had thought myself to be safe from Her watchful gaze in my foolish delirium.

But from then on, I had kept my eyes wide open in the night as Pagan Min turned on his side and dared to wrap an arm around me. And I kept my eyes open through til morning, even as he whispered sweet nothings into the back of my neck until he did, truly fall asleep. He assured me that night that he had wanted my touch. But had _I_ wanted to give it, truly?

I am ashamed to tell you that I did. A better part of me would tell you I was merely stolen from the Gods for that long hour of my life. That Yalung and Yakshini had taken hold of my heart and my mind and twisted them for the fun of it. Or that Pagan had somehow cast a spell on me with drugs or coercion or force. And perhaps he _did_ cast a spell on me. But it was not one he had facilitated entirely on his own. I was just as much to blame in my own head.

A better part of me denies who I am, and who I must be despite the Gods. And that better part of me, woefully, is wrong.

For that was not the last time I had lost faith in myself, and each time I did, less and less faith returned in the aftermath. I never closed my eyes to the night again when Pagan came to my tent.

-

\-----

-

It was the very next night that Pagan Min returned to my tent when our troop had not moved from our camp. There had been too many of our opposition taking to the roads and staking out for us to warrant our original push further North. We could afford to wait a few days where we were hidden in the woods if we had to, and so we had taken to bedding down and weathering out the cold snap.

All of that day, I had found myself thinking only of what I had done the prior evening. There was no way I could have organized any of our brothers to move, so preoccupied as I was with the shameful secret I now held in my heart. Nobody knew of our interlude in the tent. And nobody would know, if I had anything to say about it. I had worried then that Pagan would have outright told the entire camp the next morning, but I know now that that would have been a threat to his push for the throne. He was never concerned about me, only about his own benefit and the twisted games he played. And so he kept it mum, and treated me as normally as any other day.

I had thought perhaps he wouldn’t be so bold as to try again just one day after our first incident. I had thought maybe he'd be more couth in his pursuit of me, as it was. But as I'd settled all alone in my tent and tried to stave off those prickling, wanton thoughts, he'd come and brushed his hand on the front flap again.

And I'd let him in. Willingly.

Out there among my men and his, Pagan was a talker. I could hear him chatting all evening over dinner with them. His laugh carried for miles when he got going to cackling and egging his friends on. I wish now that I had shared in that joy then, when we had it. But in here he was silent as the stagnant midnight air, already shirtless and not half as cold as he'd been last night. And he'd sank right down under the sheets beside me and spooned up behind me in a cradle of long limbs and plush muscle

And then he'd kissed my bare neck just above my shirt, and said “I won't tell anyone.”

He hadn't been lying. I had seen that truth in him all day today.

“Do your gods frown upon what you do in the dark, Mohan?” Pagan whispered, and the gravity of that question shifted my world upside down.

The simple answer had been yes, which I told him, and which made him pull me tighter back against the curve of his body.

The complicated answer, after he'd asked me why, had been _no,_ not _truly_. Society played just as much a part in this stigma as Kyra and Banashur and their will. Tradition was _tradition_, and a larger part of me wasn’t going to break that just for this foreign soldier fighting my war with me. Pagan spoke to the _smaller_ part of me in soft kisses and a spread of his hand on my belly above my shirt. Pagan spoke to me with gentle nuzzles of his nose into the back of my hair, and a tiny little sigh that had my hairs raising on end when his warm breath blustered against my neck.

“Pagan, I cannot,” I had pleaded, even as I willingly shivered against his touch and his lips, “this is wrong. Both of us are wrong.”

I hadn’t even thought of my wife that night until he mentioned her. And every day, I punish myself for how selfish I was then.

“Mohan, what you do with Ishwari in the security of your home is no different than this. Only, it's me. Lonely, cold, just as starved for comfort as you are,” he said, and he had noted my bodily reactions to his ministrations.

“You don’t know what I do with my wife, and you _shouldn’t_ know,” I had snarled at him, and instead of reacting he pulled on my shoulder to get me turned onto my back.

I let him move me as he pleased, and found his big, freckled hand cupping my cheek as I blinked up at him owlishly. My anger left me quickly when he looked into my eyes, and I thought I saw a glint of something like resentment in his own for a moment before he leaned over me to kiss me square on the lips.

Ishwari liked to kiss me, and her lips I could handle when the mood struck me. But the prickle of Pagan's mustache, and the strength of his jaw, the taste of his cigarettes and lager on his lips, it was too much for me. I had turned away, and shook my head, and he patted my cheek like a child and let me lay. I did not push him out or away from me, and he found his place behind me again, his long legs matching the bend of my own. This time, I could feel the insistent nudging of his erection through his trousers, as though he was seeking pleasure from the press of my backside against his groin.

“If your gods haven’t damned you yet for what you did to me last night, or for those impure thoughts I know you’ve been having,” he had murmured with such confidence, “then they’re not going to smite you for indulging in your curiosities. In being _yourself_, Mohan.”

That was all it had taken to flip my coin in his favor. Those words, his strong arms, the press of him up against my backside like a needling _want_ embodied…

He broke me.

Clean in two.

And then scattered me into a million pieces as my hands grabbed at his, and my hips rocked back on him with that very same hunger from yesterday. Just as much as I wanted so horribly to slot myself between that demon's legs and have my way with him, I was also terrified beyond my wits. How did it work, I had thought to myself as he had taken both of our hands down between my legs. Would he simply spread his legs and take me as Ishwari would?

As it had turned out, Pagan showed me everything I needed to know. Somehow, in our blind fumble, my eyes wide open to the darkness of my tent, he got me turned onto my stomach. I had lost my pants in the frantic tangle of limbs and collision of bodies, and apparently so had he, as his were somehow clutched up in my hand for a moment as I came to hug my pillow to my shoulders.

“Spread your legs, on your knees love,” he had instructed, so soft and sweet and insistent, and I wanted more of that soft, sweet name he gave me.

Pagan was a worldly man. He had traveled, had seen England and Hong Kong and other such places I couldn't fathom. He had clearly done this before, and with great skill, for his precision was impeccable. I spread myself on my knees for him like I had heard the loose women in Tirtha did if you paid them well enough. I thought at first that he might somehow find his way between my legs then, so sure I was that he would be the one receiving me.

When I heard him spit on his fingers and felt the press of them, warm and slick against the cleft of my backside, I knew this would not be the case. When I felt him rub, and nudge, caressing that very intimate part of me, I realized that I hadn't the slightest idea how this would work. I had thought perhaps men simply took other men in the same way they took women, with no need for preparation and only a bit of oil or spittle.

But this was not the same with me, and I assumed – with any man.

Before I could gather my wits and tell Pagan to stop what he'd started, he let out the softest of sighs and withdrew his hand himself.

“Mohan,” he said, sounding as though he was disappointed in me, like I was a child needing to be mentored, “you have to relax or I'm never going to get in. Deep breath, and push back.”

“What?” I had asked him, turning back to look as he knelt between my spread calves, both hands resting patiently on either side of my buttocks.

“This is how it works, love,” he told me, and for all it was worth in the world, I accepted that fact.

And so suddenly, as I followed his instructions, Pagan slicked his finger again and pressed, and _pressed_, and I was startled by the lack of pain as he breached me. He grunted a noise of approval and ducked in to press a kiss to my tailbone, and my body relented to the rocking friction of that single digit as he speared me with it again and again.

“That's it, _good_,” he purred, testing different angles and easing it into me until the intrusive discomfort gave way to a strange sort of _need._

I took two of his fingers in me before he bore down, pressing in to the knuckle as I whined into the pillow beneath my shoulders. Soon enough I was wanting it as badly as I was rejecting reality in my mind. I wanted more, ever more of that near delicious friction, and he gave it to me willingly. I heard him snatch up my pack with his free hand, and I heard him rustle through the contents within, making another satisfied grumble as he found whatever he was seeking and tossed the rucksack back to the other side of the tent.

When his focus returned to me, I heard him open a corked bottle with his free hand, and felt a drizzle of something cool against my backside as he worked me open for him. Cooking oil, I thought passively, and found myself soon working back onto his fingers, asking for more.

“Hm. _Greedy_,” Pagan purred, and he turned his wrist just so as he crooked his fingers, brushing against some nerve deep within me that had me crying out sharper than I’d care to admit.

Shameful was my participation in this. Sinful was my utter and unabashed lust for this man. I cried out to him, calling his name into the pillow beneath me and pleading for more of that specific friction.

“Found your switch and flipped it, hmm?” he whispered above me, and I heard him groan over the soft rhythm of a slick noise, even as his fingers stilled in me for a moment.

When I shifted to look down and between my legs, back at him, his free hand was slicked with oil and his long fingers were curled around his cock. He fucked into his own fist in shallow, eager thrusts, and the sight and sound of his own self-pleasure sent a sick sort of need coiling through me. I needed that. Needed _him_.

_Desperately_.

And he gave. Willingly, and plentifully.

No sooner had I begun begging to feel the pads of his fingers crook so deliciously inside of me, then had I changed my tune to plead for Pagan Min himself. The moan he rewarded me with gratified every deep dark part of me, and he slid his fingers out of my body only to slot himself between my legs and take hold of my hips in his still-slick hands.

The first slide of him, heavy and thick and much more substantial than his fingers had been, was enough to have me squirming to get away. All the while, he held me still, making me to take every inch of his twitching length until his hips met my backside. He left me gasping on my knees, my shoulders in the ground and my face buried in my pillow, the two of us joined at that throbbing, burning ache in me.

He had not prepared me enough, but both of us had been too hungry for the other to wait any longer.

“Please don't move yet,” I asked him, trying to bring a hand up to palm at my own weeping erection, but Pagan slapped my hand away softly.

“I won't, love,” he whispered, and I could hear the strain of restraint in his voice, “the pain will ease soon, more so when I move in you. Tell me when you’re ready.”

I could have wept for the strange clash of sensations, pain and pleasure, lust and a healthy dose of fear. My whole body thrummed with some greater purpose, and Kyra was lost to me in that moment made of sweat, and pleasure, and Pagan's hands all over me.

He got my cock into his slick hand at the same time he pulled away from me, leaving me clenching against the emptiness, and in one swift snap of his hips he was hilted once again. I could do no more than strain my legs, trying to accommodate this strange position and the pain-turned-pleasure ripping through me. I hadn't told him I was ready, he had taken me for himself. But the reward of that friction was too great, especially feeling his hand stroking me through each of his thrusts.

All I had to do was bear down, relax, and take my pleasure from him just as he did from me. Soon we had set a rolling rhythm, lost to need and pleasure and something far too close to _comfort_ for my liking. This all felt too _right_, too close to my heart, to sit well with me.

But Pagan gave, and I received like a tithe.

He had soon dissolved into a groaning mess above me, losing all pretense of prowess and skill. Each thrust was sloppy, quick, and betraying. He put on a good show of words, but this man hadn’t had much sex in his life, I thought. His hips met mine in greedy, shallow thrusts, selfishly seeking his end in my trembling body. This was entirely fine with me, as he had me at such an angle that the head of his cock mercilessly stimulated that deep knot of nerves inside me.

In that moment, we were one. In that moment, I was his, and he was mine, I thought. We shared in this human experience together, greedily taking from each other and trying to call it something less intimidating. I laid there and told myself maybe perhaps he loved me, for wasn’t that what drew two people into a bed together? I spread myself and took his rutting thrusts like the obedient man he had molded me to be, and shamefully I say that I may have loved him just a little in that passionate moment.

I met my end much sooner than he did, striping his hand and my belly and the sheets beneath me with my seed as he cooed me through my climax, telling me how good of a _boy_ I was. Not a man, older than him, and far more mature. But a boy. A boy who had slipped and fallen down a deep dark well and landed in such a way as to look up at that bright light above him and tell it –

_“I love you!”_

My cries were enough to bring my lover right over the precipice behind me, doubling over me with his heavy weight as he shoved deep inside my still-spasming body and gave me his seed in choking spurts. White hot, shockingly so. I received every bit of his essence with a greedy fervor, rather proud of myself in my delirium for having given him this gift, and been given one myself.

Pagan Min held me tight as he slumped above me, draping his lean body over the line of my back. He moved in me in shallow little rocks until he'd ridden out his aftershocks, when at last he twitched again, offering me just a little more. His chest rumbled with a low purr of a moan, and when his strength returned he peeled himself away from me just in time to bite at my aching shoulder and growl into my ear.

_“Hail to the King,”_ he said, and then he was gone into the dead of the night.

He didn’t even close the tent's flap in his rush to leave me cold and debauched in my messy sheets, the aftermath of what he’d done to me leaking down my thighs.

I didn’t even have the strength to do it myself, as I found myself not praying for forgiveness, or lamenting the betrayal of my wife at my hand. I thought only of Pagan, of the love he had filled me with, and my own selfish need for his body and heart.

I kept myself awake for hours praying he'd return. I told myself foolishly that perhaps he was simply washing himself up, and that he would return with a wet rag for me. When he didn’t come back within the hour, I told myself perhaps he was gathering food for us both, so hungry as I was after the thorough workout. When that hour passed, I convinced myself he'd gone down into the closest village to procure me some medicine to aid the ache that had seeped in when the giddy pleasure receded from me. And when he didn’t come even then, I still told myself that perhaps he was speaking with our men, or had gotten waylaid by a badger, or some such nonsense.

Pagan never returned to my tent, and I never slept that night.

-


End file.
